Student Competitions
MIT Holds First Clean Earth Hackathon
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) held its first Clean Earth Hackathon over the Earth Day weekend. More
than 70 students and professionals from MIT and other organizations came
together to focus on real-world environmental challenges.
MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE)
organized the event in collaboration with Sustainability@MIT. The idea for the
hackathon came from MIT students last year, and the coordinators spent most of
the school year organizing the event. They collaborated with industry and
government organizations to identify pressing real-world sustainability
challenges for hackathon teams to tackle. The challenges fell under four broad
categories: natural resource management, environmentally conscious design,
mobility in the modern world and refueling the next generation. The four
winning teams won $1,000 each.
"Teams organized themselves around complementary skills and
talents," said Markus Buehler, head of the department of CEE, in a
prepared statement. "Their solutions epitomized what 'Big
Engineering' is all about — producing large-scale impact on people
and sustainability, covering a spectrum of activities from environment to
systems to infrastructure."
The four winning projects were:
- A proposal to make glass recycling and reuse more sustainable;
- A new app to help cyclists record their movements, so the the
Massachusetts Department of Transportation can use the anonymized data to
improve infrastructure and systems to promote cycling as a form of
transportation;
- A proposal to help the Patagonia Conservancy, a new national park in
Chile, be fossil-fuel independent; and
- An interactive map that evaluates the cost-effectiveness of closing coal
plants in the United States and tracks each plant's return on investment
for switching to a more sustainable energy source.
MIT is considering holding its second Clean Earth Hackathon at the beginning
of the next school year, so students can use the event to prepare for the MIT
IDEAS Global Challenge and other startup contests that take place during the
school year.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at leilameyer@gmail.com.
